Why 'The Office' Works

As the main character Michael Scott in NBC's The Office, Steve Carell brings new quirks to the table that Americanize the show from its BBC heritage, while also managing to regroup the qualities of the original that inspire our recognition of life's comedies and tragedies. The characters in The Office willingly take risks, worry about job stability and watch as Scott exemplifies the unguarded emotional instincts of the un-self-examined working man. They exhibit American ambition, gluttony and pomposity in equal amounts.

The fifth season's final installment, which airs this Thursday on NBC, is also the series' 100th episode. In it, the characters convene, as many of us do in exhaustion and witless surrender, for the company picnic. The Office's popularity in NBC's prime-time lineup reveals a focus on working and striving in a time when the stakes are high. Now is an especially keen moment for a show depicting the hard-working American, undefeated and hungry, struggling to manage employment and life.

Set in a city that is culturally remote and economically moribund, Joe Biden's own Scranton, Pa., The Office is never about the height of professional ambition. In fact, in the current season, Scott seems to stumble into managerial success, outselling the other branches of the mid-size paper company with a modicum of charm and a naive sincerity that makes him almost impossible to distrust.

Private moments of encouragement occur in the series when Scott appears as a plain, good-hearted presence in scenes where a character hits a recognizable wall. "Never, ever, ever give up," he says in season three to Jim, a restless, nearly-30 sales rep who has been struggling with unrequited love pangs for the sweet-natured receptionist. It is seemingly ineffective motivational jargon that nevertheless transforms Jim's dejection into optimism. The usually out-of-touch nature of middle management scores a point where it is traditionally mocked in TV comedy.

Scott is a talented salesman with an inane outlook on managing a business. Still we always, in the end, empathize with his graceless lurch through life. His office is the most important space in his world, which doesn't seem so unusual compared to the lives of today's leaders, Vikram Pandit and Richard Fuld and John Thain. Scott sees his office and the people in it as his saving grace. Without them in his world, it collapses, and it is this tragedy that the NBC series plays with throughout the five ongoing seasons.

The BBC's The Office, which aired between 2003 and 2005, today seems almost avant-garde in its colorless style and sullen documentary format. It holds strong to the idea that an empathetic and less than winning hero is the best sort of character for a comedy. NBC's The Office is more about success and happiness, not because success necessarily equals happiness, but because in the lives of these office characters, happiness often begets success.

NBC's adaptation is successful because it takes the central message from the BBC creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's work, the well-used notion that life is really about the unexpected significance we find in everyday human interactions, and absorbs it into the modern American sitcom. Scott looks good in a suit, whereas the office boss in the BBC original, David Brent, had a characteristic slump highlighted by a wrinkled white shirt and a cheap tie. The difference in the American version is that somehow Scott manages to be a success despite his apparent bewilderment in the face of the sterile corporation. It is no longer about finding purpose in mediocrity, as the BBC version reflected. The American version makes business success the next best thing to fraternalism and solidarity.

The rise in DVD sales in our sagging consumer economy shows, in part, the ache we have for comedy in a recession. But The Office resonated before the market went south and unemployment became the most common story in many American coffee shops. In seeing success and failure as insignificant to everything that comes in between, we might find that the periods that come between good times and hard ones are more manageable than anybody thinks.